Seth Godin advised his readers to blow up their websites’ home pages. Is the home page irrelevant? To answer that, I dug up a blog post I remembered reading a couple years ago on UIE’s site. Jared Spool and his associates at UIE actually do the scientific research on questions like this.

The answer is that your site’s home page is indeed important, but not in the way you may think. And it’s not the most important page on your site, even though it probably gets more traffic than any other page on your site.

According to Jared’s research, there are two purposes of a website’s front page:

1. It gives visitors the content they want, such as with a blog or news site.
2. It helps visitors find the content they’re looking for.

That’s it. Anything else is not part of the purpose of a front page. Ads touting your latest promotion, for example, which I see all the time when we go to log in to do online banking— I’ve never clicked on those ads, and I can’t even remember what even one of them was about. And Jared’s results are the same. Visitors to the site don’t care about these things, and so they pay no attention to them.

What they do pay attention to is what they’re looking for. When someone comes to your website’s home page, by using a bookmark, for example, you usually don’t know what he’s looking for. So your home page should be designed to lead him to the content he’s looking for, wherever it is on the site. This is especially true if he followed a link from another site to your front page. Whatever content was promised in the anchor from the link should be right there or featured in a link on your home page.

But usually, a visitor will be coming through another way, to some other page deep in your site. If he did a web search, for example. Or if one of his friends sent him a link to a page on your site. Or if he clicked on one of your paid advertisements.

In these cases, you have his attention, no catch, but only for about 8 seconds. You have that long to make him want to stay longer and get further into what you have to offer. This is the critical, do-or-die moment. And this page is the most important page on your site, the landing page. A large site may have many landing pages. And each is important. But most important are the pages you drive traffic to, the links you put in your distributed articles and paid ads, for example.

So, no, don’t blow up your home page. But don’t sweat it, either, unless it’s a landing page.

-TimK

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